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Dat's Love

Dat's Love

Summary

A brilliant collection of short stories from Leonora Brito exploring race, identity, and love

'Magical, enigmatic, distinctive, accomplished and haunting . . . Brito was ahead of her time' BERNARDINE EVARISTO, FROM THE INTRODUCTION


Leonora Brito was a writer of exceptional stories. In Dat's Love, she soaks up the sights, sounds and colours of Cardiff to boldly explore race and history.

With each electric story, Brito introduces a unique cast of characters, vibrantly elevating their everyday lives. From 59-year-old Dorothy taking up nude modelling to black aristocrat Dido Elizabeth Belle absconding her uncle's estate, from the assassination of JFK to what's going down at the Blue Bayou bar, Brito blends the surreal and the mundane to redress history and immerse the reader in a vibrantly painted world.

Containing an unusual exactness and sense of place, Brito's stories are unique in Welsh fiction in presenting an insider's perspective on a black Welsh history only alluded to by other writers. Full of wry humour and startling originality, this collection features Brito's most acclaimed work.

A title in the Black Britain: Writing Back series - selected by Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo, this series rediscovers and celebrates pioneering books depicting black Britain that remap the nation.

Reviews

  • Scintillating . . . Dat’s Love conjures into being a vivid and vital picture of life in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay . . . Brito’s communicable zest for language fizzes like a seltzer . . . a high-water mark in Welsh fiction, with stories that have a real sense of a real place and stand proud on the shelf
    Nation Cymru

About the author

Leonora Brito

Leonora Brito was born on July 7 1954. Her mother was from Cardiff's docklands and her father was a seaman from the Cape Verde Islands. Brito left school at sixteen, and it wasn't until she was in her twenties that she attended college, taking a foundation art course followed by a degree in Law and History at Cardiff University. In 1991, she won the Rhys Davies Short Story Prize and her début short story collection, Dat's Love, was published in 1995. She was working on a second collection at the time of her death in 2007. Her stories were published in the Library of Wales in 2017 and dramatized by the National Theatre of Wales in 2022.
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